• MLMC Makes The Grade

• Breaking Bad Habits

• Staff Sk i l l s T raining

• National Diabetes Month

• F i tness Forward

Each New Year is filled with talk about resolutions, breaking old habits, starting new trends and making changes. It is a great time to focus on healthier choices! Did you know that weight loss helps to prevent and control many diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer? This issue focuses on tips and tools that will assist you in your journey to a healthier lifestyle in 2015. Let’s all get motivated. Find a friend or family member to help you, and together we can make this our best, healthiest year yet!

winnings, Beth donated to our local Toys for Tots drive and contributed to our MLMC family sponsorship for the Christmas season. Congratulations, Beth, and thank you for inspiring each of us to get healthy and make a difference!

MOUNTAIN LAKES

MEDICAL CENTER

Congratulations to Mountain Lakes Medical Center for several prestigious commendations for the calendar year 2014. The biggest of these accomplishments came in the form of passing the Georgia State Hospital inspection with flying colors. We are proud to report, that through the efforts of our staff, we had no patient related deficiencies. The hospital is due for its next survey in September of 2017.

The hospital also received an award from the Northeast Georgia Regional STEMI(ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction) Association for exceeding the standards of time elapsed from presentation to the hospital to transfer and Catheterization.

Finally, congratulations to MLMC for achieving placement on GHA’s Partnership for Health and Accountability (PHA) Core Measures Honor Roll. This is a remarkable accomplishment to be one of only 30 hospitals in GA to be placed in the Chairman’s Category.  Dr. Joe Forese, CEO Mountain Lakes Medical Center

Staff at Mountain Lakes Medical Center participated in their own version of the “Biggest Loser” weight loss competition as inspired by the popular TV series.

Through friendly competition and shared goals of healthier lifestyles, participants met success, shared trials, and accomplished healthier habits. Radiology Tech, Beth Bryson, was the overall “Biggest Loser” for this round. With her cash prize

Avoid tempting situtions. If you always stop for a donut on your way to work, try a different route. Keep fatty foods, cigarettes, alcohol and other tempting items out of your home.

Replace unhealthy behaviors with healthy ones. Try exercise, afavorite hobby, or spending time with family.

Prepare mentally. If you can’t avoid a tempting situation, prepare yourself in advance. Think about how you want to handle it and mentally practice what you plan.

Enlist support. Ask friends, family and co-workers to support your efforts to change.

If you know something’s bad for you, why can’t you just stop? About 70% of smokers say they would like to quit. Drug and alcohol abusers struggle to give up addictions that hurt their bodies and tear apart families and friendships. And many of us have unhealthy excess weight that we could lose if only we would eat right and exercise more. So why don’t we do it?

“Habits play an important role in our health,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Understanding the biology of how we develop routines that may be harmful to us, and how to break those routines and embrace new ones, could help us change our lifestyles and adopt healthier behaviors.”

Habits can arise through repetition. They are a normal part of life, and are often helpful. “We wake up every morning, shower, comb our hair or brush our teeth without being aware of it,” Volkow says. We can drive along familiar routes on mental auto-pilot without really thinking about the directions. “When behaviors become automatic, it gives us an advantage, because the brain does not have to use conscious thought to perform the activity,” Volkow says. This frees up our brains to focus on different things.

Habits can also develop when good or enjoyable events trigger the brain’s “reward” centers. This can set up potentially harmful routines, such as overeating, smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, gambling and even compulsive use of computers and social media.

“The general machinery by which we build both kinds of habits are the same, whether it’s a habit for overeating or a habit for getting to work without really thinking about the details,” says Dr. Russell Poldrack, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Both types of habits are based on the same types of brain mechanisms.

“But there’s one important difference,” Poldrack says. And this difference makes the pleasure-based habits so much harder to break. Enjoyable behaviors can prompt your brain to release a chemical called dopamine. “If you do something over and over, and dopamine is there when you’re doing it, that strengthens the habit even more. When you’re not doing those things, dopamine creates the craving to do it again,” Poldrack says. “This explains why some people crave drugs, even if the drug no longer makes them feel particularly good once they take it.”

In a sense, then, parts of our brains are working against us when we try to overcome bad habits. “These routines can become hardwired in our brains,” Volkow says. And the brain’s reward centers keep us craving the things we’re trying so hard to resist.The good news is, humans are not simply creatures of habit. We have many more brain regions to help us do what’s best for our health.

Baumeister is a psychologist at Florida State University. His studies on decision-making and willpower have led him to conclude that “self-control is like a muscle. Once you’ve exerted some self-control, like a muscle it gets tired.”

After successfully resisting a temptation, Baumeister’s research shows that willpower can be temporarily drained, which can make it harder to stand firm the next time around. In recent years, though, he’s found evidence that regularly practicing different types of self-control—such as sitting up straight or keeping a food diary-can strengthen your resolve.

“We’ve found that you can improve your self-control by doing exercises over time,” Baumeister says. “Any regular act of self-control will gradually exercise your ‘muscle’ and make you stronger.”Volkow notes that there’s no single effective way to break bad habits. “It’s not one size fits all,” she says.

One approach is to focus on becoming more aware of your unhealthy habits. Then develop strategies to counteract them. For example, habits can be linked in our minds to certain places and activities. You could develop a plan, say, to avoid walking down the hall where there’s a candy machine. Resolve to avoid going places where you’ve usually smoked. Stay away from friends and situations linked to problem drinking or drug use.

Another helpful technique is to visualize yourself in a tempting situation. “Mentally practice the good behavior over the bad,” Poldrack says. “If you’ll be at a party and want to eat vegetables instead of fattening foods, then mentally visualize yourself doing that. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it certainly can help.”

One way to kick bad habits is to actively replace unhealthy routines with new, healthy ones. Some people find they can replace a bad habit, even drug addiction, with another behavior, like exercising. “It doesn’t work for everyone,” Volkow says. “But certain groups of patients who have a history of serious addictions can engage in certain behaviors that are ritualistic and in a way compulsive—such as marathon running—and it helps them stay away from drugs. These alternative behaviors can counteract the urges to repeat a behavior to take a drug.”

Another thing that makes habits especially hard to break is that replacing a first-learned habit with a new one doesn’t erase the original behavior. Rather, both remain in your brain. But you can take steps to strengthen the new one and suppress the original one. In ongoing research, Poldrack and his colleagues are using brain imaging to study the differences between first-learned and later-learned behaviors. “We’d like to find a way to train people to improve their ability to maintain these behavioral changes,” Poldrack says.

Some NIH-funded research is exploring whether certain medications can help to disrupt hard-wired automatic behaviors in the brain and make it easier to form new memories and behaviors. Other scientific teams are searching for genes that might allow some people to easily form and others to readily suppress habits. Bad habits may be hard to change, but it can be done. Enlist the help of friends, co-workers and family for some extra support.

-Source NIH News in Health

Five Lifestyle Factors Lower Diabetes RiskA new study found that a combination of 5 healthy lifestyle factors may help reduce the chance of developing type 2 diabetes, even if family history puts you at risk for the disease.

People with diabetes have too high levels of glucose, a type of sugar, in their blood. Over time, high levels of glucose can lead to heart disease, stroke, blindness and other problems.

Several lifestyle factors can reduce your risk for type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease. A research team led by Dr. Jared Reis of NIH studied 5 factors: having a healthy diet, keeping an ideal body weight, being physically active, not smoking and minimizing alcohol use.

The team used data collected in the mid-1990s from more than 200,000 older adults. They then looked to see who had developed diabetes over the next decade.

The analysis showed that the more healthy lifestyle factors adopted, the lower the risk for diabetes. Men with all 5 healthy lifestyle factors had a 72% lower risk for developing diabetes. Women had an 84% lower risk. Family history of diabetes is strongly linked to type 2 diabetes. But these results show that you may still be able to prevent or delay the disease by leading a healthy lifestyle.

“Not being overweight or obese led to the greatest protection,” Reis says. “However, we found that overweight or obese adults with a greater number of the other healthy lifestyle factors had a lower risk of developing diabetes. This is good news because it suggests that overweight or obese adults can benefit by adopting other healthy lifestyle behaviors.” 

• Maintain and improve your physical strength and fitness.

• Improve your ability to do everyday activities. • Improve your balance.

• Manage and improve diseases like diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis.

• Reduce feelings of depression and may improve mood and overall well-being.

Exercise and physicalactivity can help you:

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We are here for you.Mountain Lakes Medical Center, located in Clayton, GA, provides convenient access to all your healthcare needs. We offer you and your family an array of clinical services in a safe, friendly environment. Our staff takes great pride in treating patients as if they were their own family.

Whether you are seeking primary care, emergency care, general surgery, orthopedics, specialty services,

or community health classes, our focus at Mountain Lakes Medical Center is on providing the level of quality

care that you expect.

Dr. Jeffrey Dowis, Chief Medical Officer

• General Surgery

• Orthopedics

• Wound Care

• CT and X-Ray

• Ultrasound

• 24-hour Clinic Laboratory

• 24-Hour Emergency Services

• Endoscopy

• Colonoscopy

• Nutritional/Dietary Services

• Pain Management

• Radiology

• Respiratory Therapy

• Screening Mammography

• Swing Bed

706.782.3100196 Ridgecrest Circle | Clayton, GA 30525MountainLakesMedicalCenter.com